


The Reckless Terms of Unconditional Love

by ActuallyAndroid



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Aphrodisiacs, F/M, Graphic Depicitions of Rape, Jealousy, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Pining, Unrequited Love, Yandere, a lot happens here, and none of it is good
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:07:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22161547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ActuallyAndroid/pseuds/ActuallyAndroid
Summary: The things Henry cares about always seem to leave him behind. It is midnight when he takes the first step to remedy this, and dawn when he takes the last.
Relationships: Henry (Fire Emblem)/Reader, My Unit | Reflet | Robin/Reader
Comments: 37
Kudos: 153





	1. Midnight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SabbyWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SabbyWrites/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thank you to [satine](https://tooawesomeforawesome.tumblr.com) and [BabyBooBooty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabyBooBooty) for beta reading this chapter!!!

It happens without warning.

There’s no ominous fanfare, no frantic screaming, not even a cold sweep of dread that combs through your spine in the early morning. In fact, you wake with a satisfied smile, the fresh glint of gold on your ring finger a welcome distraction from the world outside of your tent. The deer fur inside your sleeping bag brushes over your bare skin as you roll over to face Robin—your husband-to-be as of yesterday evening.

Though you expect to see him sleeping at your side, you’re not overly alarmed by his absence. He’s an early riser by habit, and he often goes outside to scout the perimeter before you stir yourself awake. Instead of rushing outside, you curl into your sleeping bag and try to re-imagine the entirety of yesterday’s evening, all the way from the pale half-circle of moonlight that glimmered through the gap in your tent to the splay of his fingers against your hip as he buried his head in your thighs.

It’s unfortunate that your fondness of the memory is tempered by the way your own body seemed eager to sabotage the night, and any sort of conclusive pleasure proved elusive despite Robin’s enthusiasm to provide it. Changing pace, position, and even technique was entirely ineffective—though that didn’t stop him from exhausting his options until he gave up and slumped against your bare chest in defeat.

“Well,” he began, in a tone so forcefully optimistic it was clear he was just trying to humour you, “this is probably karma for trying to consummate our marriage early.” The guilty way he avoided eye contact made it clear he thought the real fault lay in his inexperience: an assumption only confirmed by the hollow, self-conscious nature of the laugh that followed.

“That might just be it,” you said. He’d made many nervous jokes over the course of the evening, (“Sorry if I seem a bit lost. If I’ve ever done this before, my memories must have atrophied with the amnesia,”) and it made you all the more eager to absolve him of blame. “Honestly though, I’m really sorry about this. I just don’t know why things aren’t working. This entire night has been nothing short of perfect.”

Scepticism is one of his most transparent feelings. It hardens his features—makes him analytical and cautious (like he does on the battlefield, where a wrong move could cost him someone’s life) and the way he scanned your expression suggested easing his insecurities would be a matter more difficult to diffuse than picking a few choice words.

“Honestly, I don’t know if I can forgive you,” he said with mock offence. “Sweat and tears went into this. I’ve been spending most of last week with my nose buried in a book about cunningulus.”

You laughed and a satisfied smile overtook him. _‘Are you serious?’_ you wanted to ask, but the shy way his eyes flit away from yours answered the question. He might have been teasing, but he wasn’t lying.

“Well, I can’t have that. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?” you said instead, deciding to ease his embarrassment by playing along.

“You can let me try again tomorrow,” he said, with an earnestness that caught you off guard. “And if I still don’t get it right after that, you can let me try again until I do.”

The breadth of eye contact you shared in the silence that followed sparked something between you, and wordlessly, Robin leant forward to kiss you. It was gentle, but the eager push of passion snowballed quickly. He dipped his body into yours and there was an oversensitivity to your skin (leftovers from his inconclusive ministrations moments ago) that made you eager to hurry him on. When you grabbed a fistful of his hair and tugged him downwards, the gasp he gave made your head spin, and it didn’t take long for moans to cut between the breathless little whispers you spilled into each other’s lips.

One of his hands reached down below your blanket. It was warm, though you became explicitly aware it was slightly colder than the heat pooling at your core when you felt him put two fingers inside of you, sliding them in an out with a gentle pace that had you rocking against his hand. Your back arched when he curled them, but he resisted the allure of watching the loll of your hips in favour of seeing your expression: a dazed, love-struck look he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.

It was only a fortnight ago that he’d made up his mind to marry you. Beneath the cover of a deceptively beautiful, dawn sky, he watched a line of blood trickle down your hand to the hilt of your silver dagger. Even standing on the body-strewn earth of a freshly razed battlefield, it was a sombre sight: a grim reminder that despite his planning, provisions, and increasingly blatant favouritism (even Chrom, dense as he was, realised Robin funnelled all the best items your way), he could never guarantee your survival.

At any point in time, a moment of distraction could reduce both of you to a pile of picked flowers on an unmarked grave—a far cry from the chaste daydreams of marriage and family that glazed his eyes over when he woke in the morning, and even further from his indulgent reveries during restless nights, when one hand caught his breathy whispers while the other slicked his skin beneath the fur of his sleeping bag.

Waiting was a luxury, a gamble he didn’t have the patience to bet on. Within one week, he’d bought a ring, fashioned it with a red gem polished to perfection, and it took him another seven days before he finally gathered the courage to give it to you last night.

“What do you think?” he asked, after leading you to the edge of a bank thatched in overgrown heather. The running water lapped at the pebbles of the bank and the sky overhead glittered in a countless array of stars that marked a milky path from one side of the horizon to the other.

“Wow,” you whispered (as not to intrude on the cricket’s song). You marvelled at the night sky, an he couldn’t help but grin at the reflection of the stars in your eyes.

By the time you turned back around to look at him, he was already on one knee, clutching the opened, wooden box to his chest: a beautiful casket for the ruby gemstone that glittered in the sparkle of stars.

“I love you,” was his explanation.

One he repeated many times over on the way to your tent, between feverish kisses and warm hands.

Your voice wavered when you gingerly returned his confession, and the urge to kiss away your little breaks and stutters became an all-consuming need that pushed his lips to yours—brought his glistening fingers to further curl inside of you—stoked the burn at your core and made you wrap your arms around his shoulders so tightly that he lost grasp of his own breath. 

“Hold onto me,” he continued, and there was definitely something buried between its lines—something about protection, about dependence, about trust and love and feeling your skin on his, but it was all blurred in the fuzz of your fading vision.

The only thing you could think was to pull him closer, and he rewarded it with another, desperate kiss. You felt the come-up like the swell of a great wave, and broken strings of affirmations trickled out of your mouth: a tangle of encouragement and confessions buried amid a series of gasps that he kissed from your lips like it was the only way he could keep them. Since the very first moment you saw him today, he tried so hard to make this proposal a good experience for you, and you wanted nothing more than to show your appreciation.

But just as the tumult of pleasure came to a peak—

“No,” you sobbed, like you were in pain, and Robin pulled his hand away immediately.

“Again?” It was soft, apologetic, as though he was afraid the sound of his voice could break you. For the first few seconds, you were afraid it might. An excruciating feeling had ripped through your body and left a void in its wake, like pins needles had torn holes into your skin. By the time the worst of it faded, every last bit of pleasure had been cleared out with devastating precision, and even the ensuing emptiness was so all-consuming you felt you’d lost your body to something foreign and hostile.

From his spot beside you, Robin gathered you into himself and used his clean hand to run circles into your hair. “It’s alright; it’s over,” he said, but it wasn’t. The numbness stayed, even as he feathered kisses into your temple, drew the blanket of animal fur (like a curtain) around your naked body, until the last remnants of your would-be orgasm dissipated from your legs, and you felt yourself come to life, bit by bit.

“I’m sorry,” you mumbled into his skin. Something had to be wrong with your body to twist his ministrations into searing agony, you knew that much. Robin had been nothing short of perfect all night, and everything he did was so attentive, so _loving_.

“Don’t be. There are many reasons this could be happening, and not a single one of them is your fault.” There was something so utterly careful about the loll of his thumb against your bottom lip that you couldn’t help but come face to face with how precious you were to him, how much he would give to see you stop blaming yourself.

“Okay,” you replied, and put all of your fortitude into a smile that you nuzzled into his shoulder—a kiss that you pressed against his jawline, and a sultry murmur that tickled his ears. “You know, it doesn’t have to be about me tonight,” you said, because you couldn’t help but think that after all his effort, he deserved better than this. Your hand rubbed circles into his inner thigh. “If you want, I could—”

“No, that’s—” he said firmly, but seemed to lose his cool when he realised he’d interrupted you, because he held eye contact for just long enough to give you the chance to continue before he urged onwards, “I want you to be first.”

“Are you sure?”

He only smiled and gave you a sweet, gentle kiss. You told him you loved him, gave one in return, and chose to shelve the night away in favour of falling asleep against his chest.

* * *

The sun has inched half-way into the sky by the time you get dressed. Normally, Frederick wakes everyone up at the crack of dawn, but the camp has been inexplicably silent all morning and you’ve been eager to savour it; you’re sure news of your engagement has travelled fast, and you doubt Maribelle will pass the first chance to take you aside wax lyrical about your wedding. Sure, she likes to pretend she’s allergic to fun, but she’s surprisingly consistent about sticking her nose into other people’s business when there’s a party to plan.

When you step outside however, there’s no-one to be seen, and the absence of smoke suggests the circular campfire outside of your tent hasn’t been lit since last night. Gregor usually tends to leave some kind of meat smoking over the flame until the Shepherds gather around the fire for dinner in the evening (though it’s usually half-gnawed by then, thanks to a certain manakete who often crawls out of the bushes when she thinks no-one is around just to sneak some bites in).

The creep of premonition whittles at you every time you look around to be met with an empty horizon, but it’s only when you’ve walked half-way across camp that you realise even the birdsong has succumbed to a deathly silence. Thick clouds hurtle across the sky overhead, but without so much as the flutter of a breeze, it feels like time has come to a stand-still.

It's strange; unbearably so.

A growing sense of unease leads you walking down the same riverbank you and Robin traversed yesterday, and it’s only then that your efforts are rewarded. Tucked away in the shade of an oak tree, Henry’s gaunt figure crouches over a twisted root.

“Hey!” you call out to him, and he looks up at you immediately.

“Ooh, you’re awake!” the undeniably excited lilt to his voice is almost enough to take your mind off the fact he's noticed you’ve been sleeping in, which, had it been anyone else, might have embarrassed you.

“About time, I know. Believe it or not, I still had to drag myself out of bed,” you say and crouch next to him to settle under the shade of the oak tree. The shadow it casts is paltry against the grey sky overhead; it only suggests a muddle of dimness—a soft edge that feathers around you in a circle. Some distance away, a grey squirrel watches Henry with blank, listless eyes. Only now do you notice he’s clutching a pile of grass seeds in his hand, probably in an attempt to waive it over.

“I’m not surprised,” he says. “You and Robin were up late last night.”

The burn of mortification flushing through your face is immediate. “You mean you heard us?” 

“Sure did! You were at it like rabbits!”

You know it probably doesn’t bother him as much as it bothers you, but you still can’t force yourself to look him in the eyes. Henry’s tent isn’t even that close to yours. If he was within earshot, it’s certain that—at the very least—so were Gaius and Libra, and by the Gods, if you could pick two people to go through the grievance of listening to your premature honeymoon, it certainly wouldn’t be them.

“I wish I could go back in time and shove a sock in my mouth,” you bury your face in your hands and groan. "Sorry Henry. Robin proposed yesterday, so, mortifying as it is, I think we got carried away.” You flash him your hand, and even in the dim light that peeks through the blanket of clouds in the sky, the ruby on your engagement ring glitters brilliantly.

“Yep, I know,” he says, in his signature, upbeat tone, and goes back to waving his hand in front of the squirrel. He’ll probably be here all day; it’s just about the most unresponsive animal you’ve ever seen.

The fact news of your engagement has gotten out doesn't surprise you. Theoretically, the Shepherds are all a band of war-hardened warriors, but gossip-wise they’re more akin to a bustling playground. A comparison made inevitably worse by the fact most of camp heard you last night.

Maybe everyone is missing because they've amassed to hold a surprise party? Either that, or they’ve gathered in some remote corner to grill Robin about the play-by-play.

"Are you gonna stay here, Henry?” you ask.

“I feel like sticking with you today, so I’ll go wherever you’re going.”

“Then help me look for the others.”

There’s a curious glimmer to Henry’s eyes as he watches you stand. When you give him your hand, he takes it with a reserved softness that strikes you as out of character for his normally assured demeanour. His pale, slim fingers are deathly cold—like he spent the last few hours dipping them in an out of the river.

“Someone really needs to get you a pair of gloves,” you muse aloud. There’s an instance where he stares at your lips, and you’re almost tempted to point it out to him before he speaks.

“But then I couldn’t ask you to warm me up.”

You lift an eyebrow and inspect his expression—a blankly cheerful smile that tells you nothing about what’s going through his head. You’d like to think you’re one of Henry’s closest friends, but you still struggle with moments like this, when he throws you off kilter and his intentions recede into a black hole.

“What do you mean?”

“Aw, you don’t remember?” he whines, like he’s genuinely disappointed. “Like the time we danced together.”

Ah, that. It was a while ago, just before the cusp of the turning point in your relationship with Robin (sometime after you had a very romantically charged, theoretical conversation about marriage, but preceding the first time you suspected something was brewing, when he made all the shepherds measure their ring fingers with the paltry excuse of finding some enchanted jewellery in the market) that you had an impromptu waltz with Henry at the edge of camp. You weren't drunk, exactly, but you were certainly tipsy, and so appalled by his cold hands that you felt it appropriate to blow some heat on his fingers.

“I won’t always be around to do that, though. What happens after Robin and I get married and elope to the Hotrealm?” You’re joking, but Henry’s smile takes a strained feature, like your absence is something he’s yet to come to terms with.

“I’d come with you,” he says resolutely.

You’re not sure how to respond at first; a shade of unfamiliar straight-lacedness has crawled into him and made him noticeably less playful and strikingly more enigmatic. Worst of all, nearly all of your jokes are falling flat with him today, which makes you wonder if the borderline traumatic (and yet somehow, no-less loving and heart-warming) events of last night have whipped your sense of humour out of your body.

“I think you’re onto something,” you tell him. “Maybe after the war, we’ll take all of the Shepherds sunbathing. To hell with spending the rest of our lives on a battlefield, right?” You stretch your fingers out towards the stubbornly muddled sky—and even as the sun peeks through where the blanket of clouds stretches thin, you feel a complete absence of daylight. “In retrospect, I don’t blame you for being cold all the time. Ylisse might have the better royal family compared to Plegia, but it has nothing on the weather.”

“Maybe that’s where you should elope to instead,” he offers, and you snort.

“I’ll definitely bring it up with Robin.” You eye the trail down from the oak tree, where bushels of heather sway with an invisible wind. “We should probably find him first, though.”

Henry doesn’t offer any ideas on the Shepherd’s potential location, but he mirrors your footsteps on the way back to camp with an unhurried playfulness that might have been suspiciously carefree in any other person.

* * *

It feels like hours have passed when you give up.

You’re nestled among an outcrop of birch trees that overlook the campfire. When you lie down to stare at the sky, the earth’s moss lining bends beneath your weight, and white clover flowers brush against your exposed skin. Henry sifts selectively through the soil a couple of paces away, plucking a few and winding them together.

“I don’t get it,” you mutter to no-one in particular. “All the supplies are where they should be, so they couldn’t have left. There’s no bodies or blood, so an ambush seems unlikely.”

It feels like there’s a big part of the puzzle you’re missing. If the Shepherds were avoiding camp as some build-up to a practical joke, you sincerely doubt it would go on for this long. Multiple times you’ve considered that this is just a dream, and you’re distinctly hopeful that if you go to sleep, you’ll wake up to find Robin sleeping beside you.

Henry, seemingly totally nonplussed by the situation, jumps to grab a branch above his head and uses it as leverage to climb a birch tree.

“What time did you wake up today?” you ask him.

He hmms before he gives you a response, like he’s thinking about it. “Dunno. The sky was pitch black, though.”

“Since midnight, then?”

“Sure, that sounds right.”

And he hasn’t noticed anything strange? The more you learn about this situation, the more unlikely it seems. Whatever happened overnight was very flimsy in its discrimination. It chose to take Robin but left behind the person sleeping in his arms. Wiped Tharja from existence but ignored her significantly more infamous Plegian neighbour. You don’t understand it. No force you can ascribe a name to has such an objective.

You squint up at the clouds, and the pallid glimmer of daylight bares its passive existence at you.

“Have you noticed,” you start, “that the sun hasn’t moved all day?”

For a while, the only thing you hear is the tentative shuffle of the leaves against a breeze you’re yet to feel. The clovers beside you bristle in time with it, but you feel nothing: no gasp of wind on your skin or breadth of cold air against your goosebumps.

“It’s been like that since before you woke up,” Henry replies, and you wonder why he didn’t think to bring it up. “It’s weird, isn’t it? I didn’t think I cared about the sun all that much, but it’ll be boring to live in the same time of day for the rest of our lives.”

Settled in the crook of the tree, he swings his legs over a branch and feels around his collar for the pair of clover flowers. You watch him nibble at the flower-buds, but they barely touch his tongue before spits them into his palm and tosses them aside, like there’s something off about their taste. Another thing to add to the exhaustive list of things that are wrong with your surroundings.

“Maybe it’s not the Shepherds we should be worried about. I’m starting to think that whatever this is, it's happening to us, not them.”

Any semblance of magic is far from your area of expertise, but you’d bet with confidence it’s mixed into this somehow. Hexes often do strange, unpredictable things, and you know of no blade that can kill the breeze or halt the journey of the sun.

“You’re not in danger, I promise,” he declares boldly. It’s the first clue that makes you think he knows more about your predicament than he’s letting you privy to. “Cross my heart,” he says, doing just that, “I’ll die before I let you get hurt, even a little.” He delivers this incredibly loaded admission with absolutely no weight to his tone. Forceful honesty: a conversational turn so commonly associated with Henry it could function as a verbal signature.

“You’re very protective when someone gets on your good side; you know that, right?”

“I sure am!” he says and laughs.

You relax into your bed of clovers and moss. “Hopefully, it never comes to that. I care about you too, and I’d rather you don’t die if I can help it.”

“Aw, I’m touched. You’re going all soft on me.”

You laugh too. “Maybe a little.”

This brings a pleasant lull in the conversation, and you spend the time trying to recall any mages that hold a grudge against you. Sure, Henry could be targeted for any number of reasons. He’s culled countless people, betrayed the entirety of Plegia by joining the Shepherds, and if you take Tharja’s word as law, his reputation as a fearsome mage precedes him. But you? Even in your home-town, most people would be hard-pressed to remember your name, and for good reason. You’ve spent your whole life trying not to leave tracks.

In the silence, a blackbird flies through the sky and lands on the branch Henry is perched on. It has the same, pitch-black eyes as the squirrel you encountered previously, and once it settles, it stops moving altogether—with little more than the slow pulse of its breathing to set it apart from a statue.

Henry reaches towards it, but even as he gathers it into his fingers, it does nothing.

“The animals need to be fixed,” he breaks the silence to say, and it’s your second clue he knows more than he’s letting on. “This one’s limp like a dead cat.”

“Fixed?”

“Yep. This whole place is totally out of whack. So many things are wrong I can’t even count ‘em!”

“Do you know where we are?” you ask. It’s a shot in the dark, but you regret not asking earlier when he gives you his response.

“Someone’s hexed us to an alternate realm,” he says matter-of-factly, still swinging his legs like nothing particular is happening. “We’re stuck here. Maybe for good.”

You sit up with a start. There’s a lot of things you want to ask (why he’s waited this long to fill you in, for instance), but you settle for the most important. “You can’t think of a way to get us back?”

He shrugs.

“Well, don’t hurt yourself thinking about it too hard,” you provide sarcastically. Honestly, you’re a little annoyed. If he’s being honest (which isn’t even a reality you want to consider at the moment), your frustration is probably unfounded. But you can’t help it. He’s the best mage in the Shepherds, arguably the best mage in Ylisse, and his dismissiveness here is doing little to not come off as careless. “But have you even given it some thought? So far, it seems like you’re not even trying.”

With a demure, soft movement, he drops from the tree branch and lands on the grass. He’s not smiling, not _properly,_ and you really feel like you’ve went too far. Henry might be strange. Might be mysterious and scandalous in a chaotic way that makes it difficult to ascribe him motives within the realms of your own morals, but—

“You’re right; I’m not,” he says and laughs.

Your mouth runs into a tight, thin line. So much for that, then.

“Wanna know why?” He holds the bird in his fingers as he skips in your direction, and its black-eyed, thousand-yard-stare locks on you.

You nod tentatively.

“Cause I wanna stay here,” he starts, and presents the bird to the sky like he’s encouraging it to fly away, “with you.”

“Why?” you ask, giving him an incredulous look that does nothing to curb his smile. “Do you not miss the other Shepherds?”

The bird appears wholly unimpressed with the expanse of grey (which isn’t surprising; you can’t say a broken sky would impress you all that much either) and stays on Henry’s hand, though it never stops looking at you. “Course I do! Frederick’s training isn’t so bad when you get used to it, and no-one makes pies quite like Sumia. I just don’t like any of them nearly as much as I like you.”

You read his response to be a friendly admission, so you’re not sure why a dreadful shiver runs down your spine. “Well, how long are you planning on keeping us here?” you ask, crossing your arms over your chest. Henry seems to be forgetting there’s a time-limit to your disappearance; If you take much longer to find a way out, you might not have a camp to come back to. 

He tilts his head curiously, though he holds that same, unperturbed expression, like he’s discussing nothing more significant than the weather. Suddenly, the blackbird takes off with an urgent flap of its wings, and strands of Henry’s hair flutter in the gust it leaves.

“Forever, duh.”

You uncross your arms and gape at him. Does he even realise what he’s saying? To abandon the shepherds, abandon _Robin_ , and for what, exactly? To spend more time with you? He's your friend! If he wants to see you, all he has to do is ask.

“Henry, you know we can’t do that.” 

His ever-present smile reveals nothing of his true intentions, but his next words tell you all you need to know.

“You might not get a choice.”


	2. Dusk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey everyone. it's been a while. i hope you've all been able to stay safe. ❤️

Once upon a time, your mother gave you a dagger.

In its first rendition, it was a sad scrap of three parts: several leather strips bound around a rusted, iron blade, and a single nail pinned at the heft, holding it all together. Allegedly buried in a bone pit north of the village—nigh worthless even for the furnace. The number of gifts you’d received up to that point could be counted on one hand, and it was a far cry from the carved, wooden toy you got on your fourth birthday, the sewn rag you were given on your fifth, and the blood-stained turban your mother claimed to have found on the floor outside of your house two weeks prior.

Despite this, you’d always been taught to take every gift gratefully and without question, so you wrapped your little fingers around the hilt and held it up to the light like a gem. When you said, ‘thank you,’ and kissed your mother on the cheek, she gave you a grim nod, pointed to her heart, and told you to aim there if someone ever put your life in danger. “Scramble for survival,” she had said, “whatever the cost.”

Perhaps her instruction should have rendered the gift with some sort of sobriety that would make you reluctant to use it, but the excitement of having something new was so overwhelming that any excuse to hold it was enough: from digging dirt beneath your fingernails, scraping black mould from the wall of your house, or as ammunition against gnats who were unfortunate enough to land on the ceiling above you. Your mother never said anything to discourage your whirlwind romance, even during the (several) instances it got stuck in the roof and she had to climb on the table to dislodge it.

You slept with it under your pillow on nights when the house was empty. In summer, with long days streaming sunlight through the cracks in your walls, you would often exchange this for the single book you had in your household, but you scarcely had beeswax for candles and most nights were too dark to see any of the words. So the dagger became your favoured companion, and you felt most secure with your fingers curled around its hilt beneath the pillow (as if to assure yourself of its continuous existence) until your mother returned home at the first sign of dawn and shuffled into bed with you, replacing the leather hilt with the warmth of her hand.

At least until she set out one evening to never return, and the dagger replaced that, too.

You patched a little pocket on the inside of your boot so you could carry it without suspicion, only to be brought into daylight when you were chased into a dead-end or caught sleeping in the rafters of someone’s property. (Which, as you got better at sneaking around, happened less and less.) Secure and dependable, it became a day-to-day bearing at your heel in your ever-changing scramble for survival. Your little pivot point.

And so it went, that the scrap of iron somehow became sentimental enough to justify a piece-by-piece refurbishment; the nail, first, which crumbled into powder the first time the dagger was dropped. The blade, replaced with a freshly cut, iron edge pilfered from the smith’s wicker basket. At some point, you gave it a wooden cross-guard, replaced the binding of the hilt, and soon after you joined Chrom’s forces, Robin gave you an enchanted, amber gem to embed into the pommel. But despite its history of workshop, it was, in essence, the same thing, and you could never quite gather the courage to replace it. Even now, when it shares no parts with its original predecessor—a hilt of bone bound in leather and a freshly sharpened, steel edge, it is somehow more intrinsic to you than your own skin.

* * *

Which is why you don’t say another word, only slip the dagger into your sleeve with a practiced movement and jump at Henry, pressing the blade to his throat.

“Sorry,” you tell him, “I like you, but I’m not letting you keep me here.”

He laughs. The dagger brushes against his Adam’s apple. “Oh, you don’t _really_ wanna do that.”

“Henry, I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I. This will hurt.”

With that, a horrid sensation of burning blooms through your arm, like you’ve shoved it into an open fire. You scream. Henry breaks himself free of your grip and mutters some run-on-string of sentences in tongues unknown. Every word feels like being branded with molten iron. You claw at your skin.

“You probably don’t wanna be moving around, you know. That makes it worse.”

Near-blind with pain and anger, you swing your dagger in the direction of his voice.

“Whoa there! You might hurt yourself if you’re not careful. That thing is sharp!”

Your muscles erupt in agony, sending flames outward like a ripple. Again, you swing. The pain is so all-consuming you can’t speak or scream. Burning. You’re burning alive from inside out.

Henry grabs your wrist, mutters more incomprehensible sentences. All at once, your joints lock in place like you’ve turned to stone and your knees buckle, sending you to the mossy floor. The dagger falls nearby with a soft thud. A few more ripples of agony pass through your muscles before easing. There’s only the slow scorch of your ribs moving up and down with your stuttered breathing.

“You win,” you say. Hot tears are brimming on your eyelids. “Make it stop.”

“Trust me, it only _feels_ like you’re burning alive. You’re totally fine! Not a scratch, just like I promised. I’ll call it off when you calm down.”

You can’t believe this is happening. Not a whole fifteen minutes ago, you’d have gladly trusted Henry with your life. Now you want nothing more than to bury your nails in his arteries.

“Please,” you sputter. “Please take us back. I promise we’ll go back to normal. I’ll pretend it’s some bad dream that never happened.”

He shakes his head.

“I didn’t want to hurt you, Henry. I just wanted to go home. Back to Robin. This place scares me. I don’t know why you brought us here, but if you take us back, I’ll promise to never speak of it again. We can be still be friends.”

“Wow! I knew you were sharp, but you figured that out really fast.” He squats beside you and clears a strand of hair from your sweaty face. “Sorry, though. No-can-do. I need to keep you here from now on. You’ll never see the shepherds again, so if I were you, I’d forget about them.”

“Henry, what are you even _saying_?”

“Oh no. Are my words muddling together? That’s not supposed to happen. If you’re hearing static, that spell could have fried your—”

“No! Do you really think I’ll forget about the Shepherds because you told me to?”

“Sure. If you let me pop into your mind, I can even use a hex to help you out.”

You shake your head frantically.

“That’s probably for the best. Memory spells can be a little risky. They have this tendency to wipe your mind clean if you’re not careful,” he says, and laughs. Like what he’s said is at all funny. Like he’s not threatening to keep you caged for the rest of your life. “Plus, we don’t need to hurry. Time is super slow here. As long as we don’t leave, we have a dozen centuries together at least!”

What did you do to deserve this? For the first time in years, you had a family. A warm fur blanket every night. Comrades you could _trust._ And now you’re completely helpless in a strange land, plotting how to kill a once upon a time friend who is leagues more powerful than you could ever hope to be.

“How are you feeling? Have you calmed down?”

“Yes,” you lie, because you want him to disassemble the dreadful spells he’s woven into your body.

“Okay. If you try to attack me again, I’ll put the hexes back on, so don’t do that.” With his thumb, he draws a circle on your forehead and fills it in with a series of patterns. He pauses, watches you for a moment, and stands up, content with his work.

The first, painless breath you take is such a relief that for a while you don’t do anything else. 

Henry is happy to wait while you get your bearings, so you use the opportunity to start thinking. Your dagger is lying on the ground to your left. At some point, you’ll need to distract him and weasel it back into your possession, but for now, you should probably comply with his demands. If you want to escape, finding out how you got here is one of your biggest priorities. Best case scenario, blipping to a place like this doesn’t require much magical aptitude and you can plagiarise a sigil he’s drawn on the forest floor and be done with it.

“I’ll do what you say.” You stay seated, keeping the dagger close. “But in return, I want you to answer some of my questions.”

“Sure! Sounds easy.” Henry plops back down on the grass, taking his place next to you. You inconspicuously shuffle away, towards the direction of the dagger. He shuffles forward. Conspicuously.

“How did you get me in here?”

“I didn’t. I built this place around us. Sorta like… instead of catching a rabbit in a net, I just built a cage around its burrow, y’know? More efficient that way. I didn’t want to manhandle you.”

“Right… Well, thanks for that, I guess.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“So, uh, you can come in and out, I presume?”

“Out of here? Yep. I’ll be leaving pretty soon, in fact. This place needs some elbow grease and I can only tinker with it from the outside.”

You try not to look too pleased. If he can get out, you'll probably manage it one way or another. “Can you take me with you?”

“No way! Nice try though.” Henry closes his eyes as he laughs, and you use the chance to sweep your hand over the dagger and hide it in your sleeve. You hope he hasn’t noticed. He smiles at you like he has. Somehow, you feel like a fish hiding in the shallow edge of a stream, and you’re struck with the terrifying thought he knows you better than you think he does.

“Last question,” you press, like it will be enough to distract him. “Why go to such great lengths? If you were lonely, or you wanted to spend some time with me, all you had to do was mention it. We were—” you say, and re-think your strategy. “We _are_ friends, right?”

“Sure. For now.”

He knows. He saw you take the dagger. "What do you mean?"

Henry leans forward and places his hand over yours. The hand currently hiding the dagger. Your heart hammers in your throat. He's always been touchy-freely. Recklessly close. But this is out of realms, even for him. You're sure he's going to swipe the blade from your grip and use it to slice your neck.

But then he cups your face, and an entirely new dread jilts through your spine. You’ve spent your entire acquaintance packing Henry’s feelings into a dark box, dismissing them as too inexplicable to untangle. He’s different, always has been, but that's hardly a good excuse to pretend you don’t know what’s coming next.

"Friends don't do this," he says, and kisses you on the lips.

* * *

According to Henry, the Shepherd’s strangest habit is their eagerness to turn their back on blood-soaked soil. His Plegian ex-comrades might not have revelled in death (at least, not to the same degree he did) but they were never shy about staying behind on a battlefield, looting satchels, stealing rings, bullion, or (in some morbid cases) meat from a cadaver they bled to death. And why should it be any different? If someone had enough conviction to swing an axe through someone’s skull, coming face-to-face with a pair of glassy eyes shouldn’t put them off raiding a rucksack. In Plegia, a land ridden with poverty, famine, and drought, taking everything a carcass had to offer was often more important than the act of killing it.

Here, however, merely being in the same room as death was an unpleasant business. Even hardened, Ylissean mercenaries would briefly flit from body to body—taking only the valuables they could immediately see. They never stayed behind to examine the purple-brown bruises of blunt force, never peered into a bleeding cut to measure the sharpness of their weapon. It was a cultural difference, and a dire one at that, judging from the wary stares he got when he voluntarily loitered on the battlefield.

Henry often wondered how one could be so acquainted with death and yet want nothing to do with it. Bodies littered fields like wildflowers, and yet the only time he’d heard them mentioned had been in Libra’s regretful, mumbling prayers. It was a shame, he thought, most carcasses were fascinating (rigor mortis is adept at freezing someone’s dying expression, like a time capsule spread across the first few seconds of their death) but the Shepherds didn’t seem happy to discuss it, and he didn’t care enough to ask.

For a while, at least.

Not until the post-chaos of his third scuffle as a member of their army, when everyone else had long-left the battlefield and the squelch of footsteps from behind alerted him to a straggler. With the quick reflex of someone on a battlefield, he grabbed his tome and whipped around in his squat to recognise the stranger as the darkly dressed shadow he often saw slinking along the outskirts of enemy range. He eased the incantation on the tip of his tongue with generous regret (some ancient thing about replacing blood with maggots—that would have been a sight to see!) and set the book aside.

“Hey-o stranger; almost turned you into goop there.”

He thought maybe he scared you, because you put your hands out in a wary, defensive posture, but then you put them and down and laughed, and he didn’t think that anymore.

“Got it. Next time I see you, I’m going to shamble over with as much noise as possible.” Small raindrops bounced off your boots and sank into a red-brown mud. You knelt beside him and examined the body he was squatting over—the cleaved remains of a bandit covered in bright, bloody gashes. “Anything special about this one?”

“Not really. It has some pretty veins, though.”

A multi-layer crosshatch of purple arteries ran along the bandit’s exposed arm, running into a beautiful, black flourish at the elbow where the ripped tendons of his muscle poked into the damp air like rosebuds. Henry saw you make a face when he jostled it in an effort to tear the thing completely, but you didn’t say anything, not even when the wet, tell-tale snap of broken bone marked the arm’s complete severance and he lifted it onto his knees.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, holding it out for you to shake by way of introduction. You didn’t return the gesture, but you did laugh, and in comparison with the other Shepherds, he figured this was an amicable reaction.

“As charmed as I am by this dead bandit, I think I’d prefer to shake your hand instead.”

“Suit yourself.” He chucked the arm to the side, where it fell into a puddle of mud (or blood; he didn’t check) with an unceremonious plop.

True to your word, you _did_ shake on it. What’s more, you stayed with him, there on that field of half-devoured corpses, talking about everything and nothing at all until the first trickle of locals started dragging them onto a pile in the middle of the field, and the two of you slunk into the background, joining the other Shepherds in packing your tents away.

That evening, as you walked over a field that overlooked the horizon, a thick plume of smoke wafted from the battlefield to the orange sky. Under the dwindling embers of the sun, it stretched like a cloud into a beautiful, golden haze, and as he paused in admiration, you looked over your shoulder and stopped marching.

“They never had to do that in Plegia,” you said, mesmerised by the view. “Under the sun, bodies just…”

Henry remembered. As soon as vast swathes of birds picked a carcass clean, its bones would be dried and bleached in the stark midday, and the first sandstorm swept the desert over the remains and buried them without effort. In Ylisse, you were under the mercy of the frequent rain and lazy sun, meaning rot in so fast that even animals turned their noses up, and bodies stayed in the same place, unchanged bar some maggots and toadstools—little markers of the past.

“Come on,” you tapped his shoulder. And then, without another word, you turned your back to the smoke and marched on.


End file.
